Stephen Baxter Writes Doctor Who!

BBC Books has today confirmed details of the forthcoming publication of Doctor Who: The Wheel of Ice by Stephen Baxter, an all-new Doctor Who adventure starring the Second Doctor, as played by Patrick Troughton, with his companions Jamie and Zoe.

Speaking about the title, BBC Books’ Albert DePetrillo commented:

“Stephen Baxter is one of the leading lights of British science fiction, and I was thrilled when he decided to write for our Doctor Who list. The Wheel of Ice is a delight – a bold Second Doctor adventure with elements of the harder SF that is Stephen’s forte. It’s fitting that our first original adventure for a past Doctor since 2005 should be a book as special as this.”

Baxter is recognised as one of the world’s foremost science fiction writers. Since 1987, he has published over forty books, mostly science fiction novels, and over a hundred short stories. With degrees in mathematics, from Cambridge University, and in engineering, he is a Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. He is also collaborating with Discworld author Terry Pratchett on a series of science-fiction novels. Stephen’s novels have been published in the UK, the US, and in many other countries, and have won several awards including the Philip K Dick Award, the John W Campbell Memorial Award, the British Science Fiction Association Award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award (Germany) and the Seiun Award (Japan) and have been nominated for several others, including the Arthur C Clarke Award, the Hugo Award and Locus awards.

As a fan of Baxter’s since he released The Time Ships (an “official” sequel to HG Wells’ The Time Machine) I’m personally boiling in anticipation!

So what’s it all about?

Resilience. Remembrance. Resolution. Whatever the cost.

She had no name. She had only her mission – she would return Home. And bathe in the light of a long-dead sun… Even if it meant the sacrifice of this pointless little moon to do it.

The Wheel of Ice: a ring of ice and steel turning around a moon of Saturn, home to a colony mining minerals for a resource-hungry future Earth. A bad place to grow up.

The Wheel has been plagued by problems. Maybe it’s just gremlins, just bad luck. But what’s the truth of the children’s stories of ‘Blue Dolls’ glimpsed aboard the gigantic facility? And why won’t the children go down the warren-like mines? And then sixteen-year-old Phee Laws, surfing Saturn’s rings, saves an enigmatic blue box from destruction.

Aboard the Wheel, The Doctor, Jamie and Zoe find a critical situation – and three strangers who have just turned up out of nowhere look like prime candidates to be accused of sabotage … The Doctor finds himself caught up in a mystery that goes right back to the creation of the solar system. But it’s a mystery that could have dire repercussions for the people on the Wheel. It’s a mystery that could kill them all.